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Hylophobia

Substance dualism and the failure of philosophical theology

This is an introductory essay promoting a metaphysics of matter — a cosmo-ontology built on the findings of science. It maintains that the persistence of assigning “spiritual” grounds to our thoroughly material existence is an indication of a stubborn atavism that has been engrained in our culture by more than two millennia of substance dualism. The continued assumption of the priority and independent existence of “spirit,” despite proof that the concept is cosmologically non-func­tional, haunts theology and continues to place an impenetrable barrier between the universe as it really is and our understanding of its connection with the Sacred. Matter — the only thing there is — is granted only marginal existence in our minds, and because of this hylophobic recidivism, is forever consigned to the realms of the profane … and we, who are matter, remain forever alienated from the divine.

I want to coin a word — hylophobia[1] — constructed from the Greek words for “matter” and “fear.” My intention is, following the custom of the doctors, to call attention to an everyday phenomenon by giving it a pretentious Greek label; in this case, one designed to insinuate pathology for what might otherwise pass as normal.

Hylophobia means “the fear of matter,” but for me it represents more than fear: it is the residue of a world-view, allegedly obsolete, called “substance dualism” which says there are two physically / metaphysically distinct “substances” in the universe: matter and spirit. Reductionism — reducing matter to what it does at the level of physics and chemistry — is one of its principal symptoms, but there are others and they all betray the same attitude: a disdain for matter reflected in the denial of its transcendent properties. Hylophobia lies at the root of the autogenic disease of western culture — a collective delusion where individuals believe their own material organism is their enemy, and try to destroy it.

It is also the basis for the reluctance of western Christian theologians to embrace immanence as the fundamental concept that defines the relationship between “God” and the material universe.

I contend that hylophobia, like all true cultural pre-sets, is pervasive throughout the affected population. Its universality makes it virtually unnoticeable. It is not associated with any particular social ideology or political preference, and while it affects religion catastrophically, one of the signs that it is embedded deep within the western subconscious is that it is as virulent among religious progres­sives as conservatives. It is simply part of the horizon.

The case of “progressive” theologians is particularly revealing. I am speaking about those who have publicly declared their rejection of the traditional concept of a transcendent “God,” a concept that leaves room only for a thin and threadbare immanence, if any. Transcendence means “otherness” and it makes “God” distant and inaccessible. They are on the right track in rejecting it, in my opinion, for a heightened sense of “God’s” intimate co-existence with the universe brings welcome support to a theology trying to prove the relevance of Christianity to the modern world by facilitating: an accurate and mutually satisfying rapprochement with science, a primarily communitarian religious response and therefore a deeper, other-focused individual spirituality. It also means that religious exclusivism can not be justified and should no longer be tolerated..

This is significant for our discussion because Transcendence and Immanence ultimately correspond to the metaphysical dualism of spirit and matter. You cannot favor an immanent “God” without once and for all demolishing the prejudices and distortions of substance dualism. Specifically that means overcoming our traditional western denigration of “mortal” matter and our age-old belief in the existence and natural immortality of “spirit.” It is a liberation from the illusions of the past that we seem unable to accomplish.

1

Western Christianity has been characterized since ancient times by a belief in extreme divine transcendence — a transcendence that left virtually no room for immanence — because it said that “God” was pure spirit and shared nothing with the universe of matter.

Transcendence was originally inherited from the Judaism of the Septuagint well before being philosophically justified by “spirit.” According to Genesis “God” created the world from nothing and that means that “God” and humans have nothing in common except the fact that “God” loves us, made us for his own purposes and we are bound to those purposes whether we like it or not. “God” is like a potter who shapes his products to function as he intended. The relationship is entirely exhausted in the category of ownership; we are “God’s” property, intellectually and materially. But we are no more like “God” than the potter is like his clay. Aside from love and proprietary connections we are total stran­gers.

Then, toward the end of the second century c.e., Christian theologians embraced Platonism. Plato said that “God” was pure spirit and on that basis claimed that he shared nothing with anything composed of matter. The Christian use of Plato to explain the structure of reality thus reinforced Jewish transcendence and gave it a Greek philosophical foundation in the distinction between spirit and matter which it did not originally have.

Immanence, on the other hand, means that “God” and the universe “dwell” in one another — they share what they are by nature long before any consideration of how they may be bound by contractual obligations stemming from ownership or love. Immanence implies that “God” and man are genetically related — constituted of the same “stuff.” It seems indisputable that the founders of Greek Christianity like Paul and John, well before the dominance of Platonism, held conceptions of “God” that were immanentist. It is precisely this immanence that Paul alludes to in his speech at the Areopagus in Athens when he said, speaking of “God:”

Yet [God] is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; [Probably from Epimenides of Crete] as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ [From Aratus’s poem “Phainomena”][2] (Acts 17:28).

Being “‘God’s’ offspring” evokes a genetic sharing as between parent and children.

These New Testament allusions suggest a deep physical / metaphysical ground in nature, but they do not spell it out. The inescapable point is that a realimmanence implies a realnatural sharing of some kind between “God” and man — a sharing that comes with birth, necessarily based on the existential relationship between source and emanation, not earned by the efforts of the human being nor conditioned on human reciprocation to “God’s” creative initiative. What exactly is this real thing that both “God” and a universe made of matter have in common?

There have been various answers to that question, depending on the philosophical system that was being employed in the explanation.

The Platonic version which came to dominate Christianity from late in the second century, had a complicated, three-step explanation. In step one it was declared that “in the beginning” God dwelled alone in solitary bliss; Plato called him “the One.” The “One” was utterly unique and genetically unrelated to anything besides itself. “God” was inaccessible to all but his own “mind” (nous or logos). In step two, then, this Logos, personified (reified) as is customary in the Platonic system, “reads the mind” of the “One” and translates what he sees into a World of analogous Ideas. In step three, finally, like a Craftsman working from blueprints, the Logos infuses those ideas into an amorphous “matter” as into a “receptacle” and the material universe is born, a distant reflection of the divine essence.

Those “ideas” are the “essences” or “natures” of created things. Hence a mediated, genetic relationship is established between “God” and the cosmos that is based on the remote similarity between the “idea-essences” of the material world and the incomprehensible spiritual essence (ousía) of the “One.” Notice, matter has no place in this scheme. So, to the question, Exactly what is it that “God” and the universe have in common, in Plato’s version the answer is: “the creative ideas in the mind of the Logos.” “Ideas” for Plato, remember, are spiritual entities, the products of “spirit.” “God” is present to his creation as the model they imitate.

Later, Aristotle’s metaphysics did not fundamentally alter the “ideal” relationship between the divine essence and the essences of created things. In the middle ages Thomas Aquinas added “being” to the list of “ideas” involved. “Being” was an idea, but in Platonic fashion it was reified and identified as a real thing. It was “God.” But since “being” was an idea that included all other ideas in its embrace, the entire theory of a sharing between “God” and the universe was called “participation in being.” Thomism was an expanded version of the Platonic vision and therefore the sharing was in the realm of ideas. We shared in the essence of “God” by remotely imitating the divine perfections, all of which were captured under the umbrella of “being.”

What about matter? Since in the Platonic system “spirit” and its “ideas” were the only real reality in the universe and “matter” was the equivalent of non-being — a kind of empty receptacle — material things were what they were only by participating in the reality of the spiritual ideas (forms), which remotely resembled the divine perfections. Being came through the form, the essence. Matter did not count.

2

Plato’s conception of “remote similarity” between “God” and the universe grounded in the Craftsman’s creative “ideas” was not sufficient, however, to establish a “salvific” relationship with “God” — one that won back our lost immortality — for between anything made of matter and the “God” who is pure spirit, no contact is possible. We “fell” into matter, remember, from the World of Ideas and so contracted mortality. Embodied humans could not share in divine immortality. The weak “remote imitation” basis for divine immanence in Plato’s system could hardly explain the kind of robust statements that John and Paul were making about “God” as the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” and the guarantor of immortality.

Augustine. It is at this point that the Christian philosophical theology of Late Antiquity picks up the thread and adds to the narrative. It claims that the Logos became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth in order to bridge the infinite gap between the immortal God and mortal man. Jesus’ resurrection was the first manifestation of the new immortality given to man as a share in Christ’s double “nature” (ousía) one of which Nicaea declared to be the same as “God’s.” One appropriates that shared immortality by incorporation into “the Body of Christ,” i.e., being baptized as a member of the Christian Church. In this vision of things “immanence” was not natural, it was supernatural — the result of the Christ event. It occurred principally in the human soul, its effects on the rest of creation derived from there. With Christianity “immanence” meant the indwelling of the Triune “God” in the soul of the baptized Christian.

The Christian Platonism of Late Antiquity differed from the pagan versions in that its Jewish origins prevented it from explicitly identifying the divine-human gap with the matter-spirit divide. Christian Platonists were frustrated. They were constrained by Genesis to say that matter was “good” because it was created by “God,” but they were also convinced by Plato that matter was evil and anti-human. How to reconcile the two. The solution was definitively articulated by Augustine: Adam’s sin caused the “fall” and corruption of a matter that had originally been created good (and immortal) by “God.” In the beginning, they said, matter was good but became bad. In practice, therefore, Christian “matter” was indistinguishable from the classic Platonic version; despite its divine origins it was now as Plato described it: the locus of all limitation and seduction, all pain, suffering and death. Matter, because of its corruption by Adam’s sin, came to be associated with the devil.

This situation continued through the middle ages, even though Aristotle came to displace Plato as the preferred philosopher of universal reality. Aristotle was a student of Plato who made significant modifications to his teacher’s system. He developed a theory called hylomorphism. It said that everything, whether natural or man-made, is constituted of matter and form. A statue, for example, is what it is because of the material of which it is made, let’s say bronze, and the form or shape that makes it recognizable, like the god, Zeus. Living things were similar. They were made of organic matter and the specific “form” or “essence” that made them an oak tree or a squirrel or a human being. Matter and form were intrinsic to the thing itself, which he called substance; they were part of its constitution.[3]

“Form” for Aristotle played the role that Plato had assigned to “essence.” It guaranteed genetic development and was the source of intelligibility. It bore within itself the “purpose” for which the “thing” (substance) existed. “Form” is what made this matter a horse instead of a hippopotamus. It was responsible for what the thing was and therefore what it could and should do. Form made the thing recognizable to human minds and therefore belonged to the category of “idea.” In living organisms it was called “soul” and was also considered the source of vitality.

What made Aristotle’s hylomorphism radically different from Plato’s theory was that “form,” which in living things is “soul,” has no existence independent of the substance it enlivens. Both matter and form, for Aristotle, were only “principles” of being that did not exist on their own; they were components of the concrete existing thing — labels that identified what was conceptually distinct for human experience, not what was independent in itself. That means that one should no more expect that a “soul” would continue to exist on its own after its body decomposes than that the form of Zeus would still exist after the bronze in the statue has been melted down for other uses. Matter and form are not things in themselves but only different ways that humans look at the same existing thing. All that really exists is the concrete composite, what Aristotle called the substance.

In theory at least, therefore, Aristotle rejected “substance dualism” (i.e., that matter and form were each separate substances) and that rejection implied a monism — that reality was comprised of only one thing which is capable of being looked at as either matter or spirit. Aristotle called that one thing substance comprised of matter and form. His was a metaphysics of substance. In theory, therefore, disdain for matter in this system should have lost its justification, for “matter” is not something separate and distinct from “spirit” and therefore spirit cannot be superior to matter. Each is only a different aspect of the same thing

Aristotle’s position was that the soul disappeared when the union dissolved. But predictably in Christian hands it was disregarded. The entire Christian narrative revolved around reward and punishment of the individual after death. The separate and independent existence of the human soul had to be maintained at all costs even if it meant an internal contradiction. Hence Aristotelian Schoolmen claimed the human soul was the one “form” in the entire material universe that lived on after being separated from the matter it “informed.”

Thomas Aquinas was one of them. While agreeing with Aristotle that the soul was the form of the body and therefore that neither matter nor form was a “substance,” he was also convinced that the human soul was immortal and lived on separated from the body after death. This spelled death for Aristotle’s system, for it meant the monism of substance collapsed like a house of cards.

Aquinas’ “solution” disintegrated on launch. What was arguably possible as an academic exercise became unthinkable when floated in the real world. For, whatever your argumentation, if the soul lives on after death, even if unique among “forms,” then in practice spirit instantly and irrevocably retrieves its substantial status — hylomorphism evaporates, substance dualism is re-installed. Matter is relegated to being a separate and alien encumbrance, the “enemy” of the “soul” which alone is the person. For if the soul alone without the body is the subject of judgment and the recipient of eternal reward or punishment, then the soul is a “thing,” as independent as anything needs to be to be called “substance;” its independent existence renders an opposed “soulless” matter equally substantive.

Any chance that Aristotle would move western thought beyond Plato’s substance dualism was demolished by the unquestioned priority of the separated soul in the achievement of salvation in the Christian system. People are not stupid. It was their destiny that was being deliberated in these esoteric discussions; they understood quite well the difference between a body that dies and a soul that doesn’t. Aristotle’s theory was simply ignored. Even William of Ockham, the consummate Aristotelian, the “bad boy” of mediaeval theology who denied any independent reality to “ideas” that were not representations of concrete reality, never challenged the existence and separate reality of the “soul” now supposedly known through other means, like faith. That meant, in fact, that Plato’s view continued unabated. Aristotle never made a dent in Christian substance dualism, because the overwhelming need to have an individual judgment made Platonism impregnable.

This left Aristotle’s system an empty exoskeleton whose inner rationality had been gutted. Philosophical theology revealed itself to be nothing but a montage of disparate and unconnected rationalizations lacking internal coherence. By the fourteenth century It was becoming increasingly clear that the entire enterprise was an abysmal failure. Any attempt at rationality was immediately undermined by the requirements of the Christian cult that had achieved social and political hegemony. It is no wonder that the ruse of “scientific” objectivity was soon abandoned. The Reformation’s reversion to Augustine to replace a sterile scholasticism represented the return to pure cultic thinking without scientific pretensions that simply accepted biblical categories — the abject sinfulness of humankind and the wrathful vengeance of an omnipotent “God” — as the unquestioned starting point for understanding reality. And keep in mind this was occurring as we entered modern times with the birth of science, the use of firearms, the nation-state and the conquest of the Americas.

3

Substance dualism was so entrenched that when Descartes came along a hundred years after Luther and declared quite unambiguously that there were two separate and distinct metaphysical substances, matter and spirit, it didn’t raise an eyebrow. He was simply stating the accepted wisdom. For western Christians Aristotle’s hylomorphism had never functioned as anything more than window dressing that gave a rational veneer to an unrepentant Platonism. Descartes’ clear definition of spirit as a separate “second substance,” the source of all vitality and intelligibility, relegated matter to the realm of the inert. Matter was not a principle but some kind of “stuff” — utterly lifeless by definition: “a substance that could be acted upon but could not act,” a potential for composition completely supine before the power of spirit.

With Descartes substance dualism entered the scientific world as an axiom. It was no longer the subject of philosophical dispute; it granted science the freedom to explore and manipulate anything other than man without concern for its “value,” for matter had been made completely valueless in a world where all value was attributed to rational spirit — mind. Even the “souls” of living things other than man lost the original “spiritual” meaning given them in the Platonic system. Because of the absolute domination of the category of “spirit” by the “immortal soul of man” in the western Christian imagination, plant and animal “souls” were relegated to secondary status — in effect consigned to the sub-category of “matter.” Under the Platonic-Cartesian substance dualism paradigm, “immortal soul” was taken as completely separate from anything material, and even human beings who displayed a little too much “body” in the form of emotion or desire or stupidity or need were treated on a sliding scale proportionate to their perceived rationality. Primitives, menials, illiterate peasants, the retarded, children, women, were all considered sub-human to one degree or another, unable to care for themselves and treated as slaves or worse … “for their own good.”

Matter by itself became a lifeless desert. But I want to emphasize: precisely because it was the companion to spirit. All vitality, intelligibility, design, purpose, direction, that characterized material things was claimed to be imparted to them by “spirit,” either in the form of their own material “soul” given to them by a rational “God,” or through the control exercised over them by the rational mind of man. No one in Descartes’ universe ever denied the presence of those “spiritual” characteristics, but they attributed them, exclusively and universally, to “spirit.” “Matter” by itself had none of them, but then, matter was never found by itself.

Exit: spirit

As science progressed, the control that human rationality was learning it could exercise over material things, even over its own organism, increasingly called into doubt the belief that a “divine spirit” had any influence in the real world. The last vestiges of the claim that “God” was a cosmological factor lay in the incredibly intricate adaptation of living organisms to their environment. Nothing could explain how dumb animals and unconscious plants could have come to possess exactly those rationally sophisticated abilities that made them capable of surviving in their complex environments except the infinitely intelligent mind of a Creator “God.” The “essences” of living organisms were thought to be rationally complex energies — “rational ideas” — that resided in non-rational entities; they had to be the result of infusion from without by a super-intelligent, rational “Mind.”

All that changed overnight with evolution. After 1859 it became clear that in fact every sophisticated interlocking feature that meshed organisms with their environments was the result of incremental changes incorporated into the various species’ DNA over long periods of time. What Darwin did was to take the well-known process of selecting the characteristics of domestic animals and plants through breeding, and apply it analogously to the origins of species themselves. Instead of people, he said, it was nature itself that did the “selective breeding” by the inevitable survival of those organisms whose randomly acquired changes happened to be better suited for surviving. Those without them, of course, died out. The process “selected” among random changes. But “selection” was a metaphor; the organism simply survived. No one was doing any selecting. These changes produced a near-infinite number of living species, and shaped organisms of amazing complexity and relational power. “Mind” itself, rather than its cause, was now seen to be one of its effects.

With Darwin, the belief in the intelligent design of the universe and its species lost all rational justification. Without rational spiritual “essences” — rational ideas as blueprints — needed to explain what things were and how they were structured and behaved, the last reasons for believing in the independent existence of entities like “God” that were spirit, disappeared. Determining the place of the human mind in all this was put off ‘til later. But there seemed little doubt that the material world contained the explanation for what it was within itself. There were no phenomena that could not be explained by the processes indigenous to this world. The existence of “spirit” as a separate and independent kind of being, not only had no proof, it had also lost any explanatory value since every phenomenon imaginable, from massive geological events like earthquakes to intimate human psychological experiences, could be (or were thought to be shortly) explained by material causes. “Spirit” had lost its raison d’être.

But please notice: “Spirit” disappeared from a world that had been believed constituted of spirit and matter. That left only “matter.” But it was a “matter” that had been consigned for millennia to the dark side of the moon — the realm of the purely inert — a “matter” that could be acted upon but could not act, found itself locked into its ancient characterization. “Matter,” whose very definition had been constructed on the presumption of its partnership with “spirit,” now stood naked and alone. It was expected to fill a dual role: not only explain reality’s material functions but also the phenomena once attributed to spirit … but it was expected to do so qua matter … Cartesian matter. There was no new definition of matter to accompany the demise of “spirit.” It was “spirit’s” inert partner … now a widow.

“Spirit’s partner” is Descartes’ eviscerated “matter:” inert, passive, enlivened only by something totally other than itself. Matter remained the same inert substance that it always was as part of an erstwhile binary system, but the vitality in the cosmos, and “things’ ” ability to evolve transcendent versions of themselves, now had no explanation. The phenomena once assigned to spirit were now assumed to be the expressions of this inert, lifeless product of the western imagination. In the absence of a “material” (again, Cartesian) explanation, people tended to deny the evidence that was right before their eyes. An inert substance could not possibly be the cause of life, therefore life must be an illusion. The prejudice here is glaring. For it is just as logical and compelling to say that an inert substance could not possibly be the cause of life, therefore matter must not be inert.

4

If we were able to purge our minds of the prejudices and subconscious assumptions about “matter” that we have inherited from our Cartesian past which are the source of our hylophobia, we could begin to look at “matter” in a new light. A purified scientifically informed analysis of matter would reveal characteristics that are both self-evident and explanatory of universal phenomena; and the depth of the disparity between these scientifically verified features of matter and our reflex prejudices also explains the virulence of hylophobia … and why it is aptly labeled a pathology.

Inertia. The first is that “matter” is energy. This flies in the face of the most fundamental assumption of Cartesian matter: that matter is inert. The convertibility of matter and energy which may be adduced as proof for this characteristic is actually a misnomer. All existence is material energy. Sometimes it takes the form of visible, impenetrable, solid particles that we have traditionally called “matter,” and sometimes it takes the form of invisible fields, waves, valences, forces for attraction and repulsion that are involved in the manifold relationships that comprise the material universe. At the sub-atomic level powerful forces that account for the very coherence among the particles that comprise the protons and neutrons of atoms, are themselves also expressible as particles. Gluons are a case in point. The force that holds the quarks together to form protons is known as “the strong force.” But the “strong force” is also expressible as a particle called a gluon. Well, is it a force or is it a particle? It has the properties of both and is analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles. Photons are familiar as the “particles” that carry light. But we all know that light sometimes acts like a wave and at others like a particle.

At the base of it all is energy. There seems to be no solidity in the universe that is not more fundamentally expressible and measurable as energy. Matter, therefore, is not properly said to be convertible into energy, for there is no “matter” that is different from energy. Matter is energy. And since energy has been falsely associated with spirit in our philosophical past, to distinguish our new understanding of what energy is, I call it material energy or matter’s energy. “Energy” is matter. It should never be thought of as reintroducing binary structure back into reality. Energy is not the equivalent of “spirit,” it is simply another form and word for “matter.”

Vitality. “Matter’s energy” is the bearer of life. This also contradicts our traditional imagery which assumed that matter was dead and required the presence of something that “transcended” the material to be infused and enliven it. But we know there is no such separate, “transcendent” thing in the universe. There is only matter’s energy out there, therefore if we find that there is life in the universe it can only be because material energy in some way bears the capacity for life within itself. Does that mean that “life” occurs when a certain combination of particles and forces are apportioned, arranged and sequenced in some particular way that we so far are unaware of? Or does it mean that there is some kind of seminal vitality present below the threshold of observability in all matter of whatever kind … analogous to other properties that are unobservable except under certain specific conditions, properties like electromagnetism, or even mass itself? The physical details are not for philosophy to decide. But what philosophy must assert is that LIFE is borne by matter’s energy not something else.

Consciousness. The property least associated with matter in our tradition is thought. In fact the very theory of substance dualism was born in the attempt to explain the presence of ideas that seemed utterly beyond the capacities of matter. We know now that virtually every mental state as well as every image producible by the human mind is matter-dependent. That means that, even if you insist on maintaining that these mental phenomena are not caused by the organic material in the human brain, you have to at least acknow­ledge that if there is any damage or disease affecting the part of the brain associated with these various phenomena, that the phenomena in question will be seriously distorted, defective or even disappear altogether. So that even if there were some unknown unobservable causation here that is immaterial, it is still subordinate to the control of matter; “ideas” are matter-dependent. Such dependence rather suggests that the phenomena are themselves material products.

I believe that matter must be defined by what it is seen doing at all levels of its complex interrelationships, not just at the level of physics and chemistry. There is no justification for limiting matter by some abstract criterion generated by speculation that is not empirically verifiable. Matter is as much matter when it produces thought and ideas, as when it displays the properties like mass and electrical charge that we associate with its more primitive states. You can’t use a crippled definition of “matter” derived from the presumptive immateriality of “ideas” to concoct a concept of an imaginary “spirit” which is then said to account for the reality of what you see “matter” doing right before our eyes. It is a vicious circle suspended in midair. We see that matter is not inert; it is alive and it produces “spiritual” products like thought and ideas. Every phenomenon that had been attributed to the agency of spirit, is now seen to be the work of material energy.

When confronted with these facts, the American philosopher William James introduced the notion of “neutral monism.” Monism meant there was only one substance in the universe, and he added the important qualifier: it was neutral — neither spirit nor matter — but obviously capable of all the phenomena that up to now had been falsely attributed to two separate substances. James lived in an era when monist idealism was considered a viable option and I believe the term was chosen to allow it to function. In our time, in contrast, since matter has been the subject of such spectacular discoveries — cosmological, bio-chemical, sub-atomic — I prefer the term material energy in order to avoid any confusion that “matter” is only an “idea.”

It’s important to emphasize: there is no intention on my part to deny the existence and human significance of the empirical phenomena that have been traditionally assigned to the agency of “spirit.” Consciousness, thought, poetry, mysticism function as they always have. My entire effort is simply to show that there is no justification for inferring the existence of something other than material energy to explain them. Substance dualism was exactly the result of such an unjustified procedure. Material energy is entirely sufficient for the explanation of all phenomena in our universe; no recourse to a putative “immaterial” source is necessary.

5

Now all this put Christian theologians in a conundrum. In the absence of “spirit” they had no philosophical basis for saying the traditional things about both man and “God.” Christian doctrine seemed inextricably wed to metaphysical dualism. For if, as science was saying, there were no such thing as “spirit” opposed to “matter,” then neither the transcendence of “God” nor the immortality of the individual human soul has any ground in reality. Claims for their existence are not only gratuitous, but also meaningless, for what does “transcendence” mean if there is nothing that goes beyond the possibilities of material energy? What grounds transcendence now? Religion found itself completely cut off from the real world — forced to reject all the proven sources of knowledge on whose unquestioned authority everyone, religious people included, depend unreservedly for everyday living.

This “schizoid” existence — believing one thing in the world of work and daily life and another in Church — has accompanied the wholesale abandonment of the traditional Christian churches by the educated classes, especially those versed in science. Religion without roots in the real world appears to be nothing but fairy tales, and indeed, the ever more common orthodox concession that our doctrinal inheritance may now be taken metaphorically and not literally has left many with the impression that the theologians have capitulated and have settled on a strategy of employing religious narrative only for its familiarity while ignoring its claims to factual truth. Under these circumstances “living a Christian life” means allowing oneself to be motivated by nostalgia: to live the way traditional Christians who once believed these dogmas and associated narratives used to live. It self-consciously accepts religion as the exclusive repetition of ancient patterns and eschews all moral and intellectual creativity. It is life in imitation of honored ancestors. Christianity is as dead for those who stay as for those who leave.

Concerned theologians have attempted to overcome this necrosis by distancing themselves from the wrathful and punitive character of the transcendent “God” of Augustine’s imagination. In that effort they emphasize the immanence of “God.” While pastorally speaking it is the logical step, the inveterate western hylophobia that pervades their imagery about “God” has made their efforts little more than pious rhetoric. They have nothing to ground immanence in, and so “immanence” in their hands becomes rooted in words, “ideas,” — imaginary spirit — and dismissed as just another fairy tale.

They will not acknowledge that the source of immanence has to be the material energy of which we are made. What we share with “God” has to be what we are and that is matter. This follows from our new metaphysics — the cosmo-ontology of neutral monism. Since material energy is all there is, there is nothing else we can share. They also cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that “God” must be material energy itself. Immanence can no longer be grounded in “ideas.” For while these theologians claim to reject the derivatives of dualism — like divine transcendence — if they do not accept the transcendently creative properties of matter, the principal one of which is the energy of LIFE, they have no real ground in which to root their claims of immanence, and they end up re-installing dualism by default.

Divine transcendence is a projection derived from substance dualism. You cannot reject “transcendence” without rejecting the reason why transcendence was accepted as an unavoidable conclusion about “God” in the first place. Correlatively, the “immanence” that is offered to take the place of transcendence cannot be installed without installing the transcendently creative properties of the material energy that is the only possible ground for a genetically shared life between “God” and the material universe. In other words, “God” cannot be “immanent” in a material universe without acknowledging the LIFE creating and sustaining capacities of matter and identify that material energy quite unambiguously as the LIFE that we share, and the origin, source, principle of LIFE is what we mean by “God.” You can’t make a more traditional statement than that.

On a similar note, you can’t continue to generate hope in the immortality of the human individual after death without grounding that hope in something other than substance dualism. In other words, if it is not “spirit,” what could that be … and can it effectively (affectively) replace the traditional paradigm? Or must “religion,” considered as a program that claims to validly encourage trust in organic LIFE-as-it-is precisely because it is based in fact, be abandoned? Is religion so tied to the existence of an imaginary spirit that any other format will immediately decertify it? In other words, can “religion” based solely on matter and material processes provide the basis for human hope?

These tensions continue at the level of physical / metaphysical ground precisely because of hylophobia — the residual fear of matter based on the unexpurgated prejudice of its Platonic-Cartesian assumptions. It is the source of the reluctance of theologians to subordinate their thinking to the results of science. This is an obstacle to the pursuit of a viable alternative for religion; hylophobia constantly undermines wholehearted commitment to the neutral monism that is necessarily at the basis of a new paradigm.

I want to emphasize: substance dualism is rationally, scientifically untenable. Any religion based on it can do little more than repeat ancient narratives whose claims to factuality have been completely discredited. But the central place of reward and punishment for the individual immortal soul has rendered any alternative to substance dualism unthinkable in practice. Christianity is locked solid into hylophobia.

The absurd anomaly of a theology that pursues immanence because of its fertility for prayer and a sincere universalism but refuses to acknowledge the need to root that immanence in some physical / metaphysical ground, conjures the specter of a substance dualism that just will not go away. For in the absence of a ground in material energy these theologians posit immanence in circular fashion — hanging it on a sky hook. What can that hook be but rhetoric — “ideas.” They like the idea of immanence but they can only justify it by its posterior benefits, not because of any basis in objective reality. It becomes a completely subjective projection: they opt for divine immanence because it works for the spirituality and ecumenism that they espouse, not because it represents reality. It is the use of these affective circularities, so characteristic of religious thinking that has eroded any confidence in the validity of philosophical theology — theology as a science.

6

Part of what feeds hylophobia is the inveterate aversion to pantheism. Why fear of pantheism should be so intense in official Christian circles comes back to the ecclesiastical narrative. The Church needs a transcendent “God” — a “God” that is “other” than humankind — or it cannot run a program based on obedience. Any hint of a shared life between “God” and humankind prior to the Christ-event runs the risk of justifying individual autonomy and vitiating the mediation of the Church. For a being that shares “God’s” life ab initio also shares divine freedom and creativity, moral and custodial authority and the permanence in being that has been labeled “immortality.” Immanence implies that the norm of morality resides within oneself, implanted there by nature, inalienable and demanding recognition. This runs counter to the role the Church has assumed in a theocratic society.

But even granting that the Church admits some measure of immanence because, historically, the doctrine has always existed as a “minority report” among mystics, no adequate distinctions have been drawn between pantheism and pan-en-theism. This is critically important. For the former states that we are collectively “God,” which is absurd, and the latter that we “participate” in “God’s” life by nature. The concepts are very different metaphysically but the accusation that pan-entheism is really “pantheism” does not acknowledge that difference. Fourteenth century mystics Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porrete were both pan-entheists who were condemned as pantheists, and Marguerite was burned at the stake for it. Irish mystical theologian John Scotus Eriúgena was a pan-entheist who was condemned posthumously as a pantheist. And even Baruch Spinoza, universally considered a pantheist, in the eyes of Karl Jaspers was a pan-enthe­ist. Clearly the tendency has been to see any natural, genetic, pre-redemption sharing between “God” and man as “pantheism” and the rich and fertile path of pan-entheism, based necessarily on the acknowledgement of divine immanence, has been closed to western religion.

Hylophobia is functioning here, for even those that are willing to move in a pan-entheist direction fail to identify the structure of material reality as the evidentiary source of divine immanence. They try to ground divine immanence in some “idea,” or in a “feeling” of being united with “God,” a “feeling” that is given no basis in nature. They wax poetic over oneness with all creation and creation’s “God,” but they don’t seem to see that it is their responsibility to clarify exactly what that oneness consists of. It’s not sufficient to say it makes me feel good. What is the reason? Because “God” chooses to dwell with us? That’s the Christian narrative of redemption, which justifies Christian claims to exclusive validity … it is not the pre-Christian reality identified by Paul in Acts 17 as the common inheritance and destiny of all peoples, the ground of the universal validity of all religions.

The roots of immanence are genetic and inalienable. We are inextricably bound to “God” because we are all made of the same “stuff,” matter’s energy, the LIFE we share. That’s where theology begins: with reality … the facts … with the way things are. Theology doesn’t control the facts … the facts are given to us by science. Theology tells us what the facts mean.

But no, theology could not allow itself any such simple straightforward solution because, I contend, the solution acknowledges the primacy of matter and theologians consider the subject of religion to be “ideas” or “feelings” or “texts” out of some book — sources that justify theology’s claim for autonomy. Theology tries to confirm its independence of science by coming up with its own esoteric premises that continue to evoke a “spirit” that we know has been proven cosmologically non-functional. The whole procedure is an exercise in circularity. Theology cannot concede what is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes: we are all matter … and we are only matter. There is nothing else but matter. Matter’s energy is “being” … it is all there is. The universe is wall-to-wall matter whose source must itself be the very same matter. That means that “God” is matter. How exactly does that work? The details are for later elaboration. But the point of departure is that whatever is the source of all this universal matter cannot be “other than” matter. Theology will never acknowledge that, and therefore its efforts will always fail, especially its efforts to establish a religiosity based on divine immanence. It refuses to start with reality. If it is ever to break out of the vicious circle it has created for itself theology must begin with the firm and indisputable conclusions of science about the real universe that “God” created … not the universe our ancient ancestors thought “God” created. The vicious circle is broken by theology taking its rightful place as part of the chain of human knowledge. And it is science that provides the facts that are to be interpreted. What we ask of theology is to tell us: what does itmean that everything that exists is made of matter?

Matter is energy, and everything made of matter is a bearer of that energy, embedded in the very interstices of its sub-atomic connections. As matter evolves more and more complex versions of itself, those forms display exactly the same energies across the board — the energy to live and to survive, to interact and relate, to put the whole before its parts, to treat itself as part of a totality. It’s time we took the admonition of Paul in the opening chapter of Romans seriously:

For what can be known about God is plain because God has shown it to us. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. (Rom 1: 19-20)

Even the “text” points us toward science.

[1] I am aware that clinical psychology has already pre-empted that word for a pathology characterized by a fear of forests, but it is a rare condition and few people are familiar with the term. The parallel with hylomorphism makes it likely it will have more traffic in the philosophical sense I am suggesting.

[3] Matter and form were actually only two of four causes, the other two being the efficient cause (the maker) and the final cause (the end or purpose for which it was made). But these two are extrinsic to the object in question ( and final cause is really a restatement of the formal cause) and not really relevant to the issue of the constitutive elements of the universe. Including them would have been an unnecessary distraction.

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5 comments on “Hylophobia”

Tony, Thank for this blog. I found it thoroughly insightful, helpful, challenging, even contemplative. For me, it is a call, originating out of science, for a true non-duality between “God” and World/Matter. As I think I mentioned to you before, I see certain similarities, if not identity, between your non-dualistic explorations and those Panikkar with his image of reality as cosmo-the-andric — ONE reality consisting of t matter-divinity-humanity. — But I have a question: you conclude this blog with an endorsement of pan-entheism rather than pantheism. But you also seem to endorse James’s “neutral monism.” (Or am I reading you wrongly?) I see a big difference between monism and panentheism. Can you help me get a better hold on what you are proposing?

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify this in open forum where others can follow the interchange and respond.

With reference to your question: I am using the word “monism” in a physical / metaphysical sense to refer to the “stuff” of which everything is comprised. It answers the question: what is the “substance” at the base of all things? … and the answer is “only one thing: matter’s energy.” It is called monism specifically to contrast with Descartes’ and Plato’s “dualism” of two “substances,” matter and spirit. And it is called neutral because it is not weighted in any way toward either matter or spirit.

“Pan-entheism,” on the other hand is not a physical / metaphysical term. It is a religious or “theological” term that defines the relationship between “God” and the universe. It answers the question “how are “God” and the universe related”? It is intended to contrast specifically with “supernatural theism” which is based on “God”s” “transcendence” and rather answers by saying “God” is “immanent.”

The two terms “monism” and “panentheism” operate in separate spheres. Theoretically speaking, transcendence need not have been grounded in the spirit-matter chasm (and in fact the Hebrew bible saw “God’s” transcendence as a function of artesanal ownership, not spirituality), and by the same token immanence as a theological theory need not be grounded in matter. Indeed, pan-entheists like Eriúgena and Eckhart in the middle ages grounded their immanence in the “concept of being” which they had, following the perennial neo-platonic custom, reified as “God.” My argument is that theologians are still trying to ground immanence in the “idea” of “being” (or in something “intentional”) long after the separate and independent existence of ideas and “spirit” has been called into question. I am saying that the only solid basis for immanence and therefore pan-entheism is the “one substance” (monism) there is, which is responsible for all the phenomena that used to be attributed to spirit and matter.

I am also saying that the failure to even consider this “solution,” which I believe is not esoteric or arcane, is due to a blinding cultural pre-set inherited from two millennia of substance dualism which I call hylophobia — an aversion to matter.

Tony, I have spent about eight hours over five days pondering this magnificent blog. It was worth the six week wait and had to have taken hours and hours to compose. It took me back to 1950 and First Philosophy where I scratched my head over hylomorphism and tortured our prof for an explanation of “hylomorphic theory” by Aristotle. The only answer I finally settled for, from Prof and from classmates was : ” Well, it’s only a theory.”Ten years later I was in Rome staring at Rafael’s famous painting of Aristotle giving Plato the finger (pointing down of course) and Plato pointing up, and somehow that was Theology’s final answer, and I learned to live with this ambivalence for the next twenty years. As a mystic, I luxuriated in the immanence of God. As a Catholic priest, I had to give lip service to the transcendence of God until I realized that “it was a matter of faith as defined by the Church”, and I gradually came to realize that this faith was untenable because it made God into an idol. And thus the entire faith in heaven, hell, rewarding of good and punishing of evil, and believing in an angry, vindictive God was a primitive superstition no better than believing in a golden calf. Then, as a mystic, I was saved by panentheism when I realized that Paul’s great statement of living, moving, and having our being in this unknown “God” was a religion I felt totally at home in.
Your article now gives me the philosophical and scientific and theological explanation for what I have been living for the past thirty years or so. I especially love where you say: ” matter is energy/energy is matter. Energy does not replace spirit in a material universe. Material energy in some way bears the capacity for life within itself. God cannot be immanent in a material universe without acknowledging the LIFE creating and sustaining capacities of matter and IDENTIFYING THAT MATERIAL ENERGY QUITE UNAMBIGUOUSLY as the LIFE that we share, and the origin, source, principle of LIFE is what we mean by God.”
I know intuitively that you are right because I am sure that this will be equally rejected by atheists and theists alike, and by pantheists and humanists, too. This is always a good sign that we are on the right track. Time to go back to experiencing LIFE at its source within us. Thank you for all your work. It is a huge help to me.
Sal Umana

One of the great debates of the 21st Century, Tony, would have been to see a conversation between yourself and one Joseph Ratzinger on the ideas you present here — but perhaps 10 or 15 years ago when Ratzi had the capacity for such a debate. I suspect he would have been more inclined to excommunicate you, and anybody who dared to read your reflections, than engaged in a “conversation”. As I read it though I also thought that it would be useful to see a conversation between yourself and Francis Bergoglio. Thank you for this series of reflections, My own sense is that collective humankind is going through an enormous sea-change in thinking as to how we relate to this entire “spiritual dimension”* to our being the likes of which we have probably not seen in all of human history. (Karen Armstrong suggests we have entered, or are entering some great “Third Axial Age of Religion”. I’m going to set aside time over the next few weeks to re-read these posts and mull on them much further. (I, in fact, started reading these some weeks’ ago so this is more of a continuation of a promise I made to myself back when I started.) I have been trying to track the change of my own beliefs and perceptions over my life. I sense that I have always seen my Catholicism primarily as a “search for ultimate truth” (wherever that might lead). It is only in the last decade or two that it has occurred to me that this is actually quite an idiosyncratic view compared to how many see it. For many it seems more in the nature of a psychological comfort than any search for an “ultimate truth” however a term like that might be perceived. It occurs to me that the great challenge or disjunction at the present time in what the objective of Catholicism is comes down to whether it presents itself as some kind of psychological comfort — something analogous to the the “security blanket” of Linus in Charles Schulz’s famous Peanuts’ cartoon character — or whether it is ultimately a search for “truth” — to understand why life (and, for that matter, death, and the alpha- and omega- to our existence) is as it is.

*I confess, after mulling on what you have written, I’m even questioning my use of that term, “spiritual dimension”. I have not used the term so much in the sense of Plato as a crude division between the material and spiritual alone. Up until now I have tended to see life as composed of three “touchable” or “accessible” dimensions – the physical, intellectual and emotional – and a fourth dimension, the spiritual, which is only accessible via the other three dimensions. This fourth dimension being the one familiar to artists, creative people and scientists who from time to time experience “eureka moments” and who often cannot explain where the thoughts come from that cause that “eureka moment” experience.

Yes, I found this article very impressive and persuasive, making sense of the problems of religious formation and upbringing and the cognitive dissonance unavoidable with orthodox theology until you reject it. Thank you, Tony. I always get a lot from your articles.